Testimony from Your Perfect Girl, Page 2

  I roll my eyes, but it’s then that I know these things are happening to her. That’s why we’re all getting out. They’re trying to protect us by sending us to some dirty ski town.

  She wrings her hands, then stands up, looking impatient and preoccupied. Her hair is blown out, and when she moves, it doesn’t move with her. We have the same kind of round face, almond eyes, and thin, odd nose, rounded at the bottom in a heart shape. Our hair is the same—brown-blond and thick, but hers is dyed a brighter shade.

  She walks to me, grabs my hand. It feels bony yet soft. She smiles, briefly, when I squeeze back. This is as affectionate as she gets.

  “You won’t want to be around us,” my mom says. “Trust me. And you don’t want to stay here.”

  “But when we win, we can come back,” I say, and look at my dad.

  “Of course—” he says, but my mom cuts in, which surprises me.

  “If he wins, the people who lost their money don’t win.” Her brow is furrowed, and she worries the cuff of her sleeve. For the first time, I’m wondering if she believes in my father. He’s not looking at her, and I know they’ve been fighting.

  She gets Sammy, then walks to the stairs, touching Jay’s shoulder on the way.

  “Why don’t you guys pack up,” my dad says.

  “Now?” I ask.

  “You’ll leave on Sunday, the day after Christmas.”

  “That’s in two days!” I say. “That’s the entire break.”

  Jay gets up and goes. We’ve just been told we’re moving to a stranger’s house and that we should hide our identities, and he just gets up and goes. Our whole lives we’ve been told to represent our family name, to live up to it, and now we’re told to deny it, to pretend we’re someone else. Yet, I guess I understand the logic of getting out until things blow over. While I don’t want to live with my aunt and uncle, I don’t want to face anyone, either. Being at Evergreen assured me of that.

  “What’s Ken going to say when he testifies?” I ask. Ken is Cee’s father and someone I’m close to. I have spent so much time at their house, watching movies, playing chess, cooking, hiking—I can’t imagine being on a different side as them. I can’t imagine him betraying us this way.

  Dad looks up, his face tense with anger. “Don’t worry about Ken.”

  “I am worried!” I say. “You said these things happen in real estate, but—”

  “Yes, these things happen,” he says, his voice scaring me. “It’s not like I hold people at gunpoint, demanding their money.” He stands up. “It’s complex. And I don’t need you accusing me—”

  “I wasn’t accusing you!” My voice breaks. “I’m trying to understand.”

  He actually walks out. He’s annoyed with me, angry with me, his complacent, perfect girl. He doesn’t think I’m capable of understanding, which I know I am. I cry, but put a hand over my mouth. I don’t know what I’m crying about. I just feel abandoned and ashamed. I feel like my life just changed in an instant.

  I walk past the living room table with the bowl of Christmas cards we’ve gotten this year. Some family I don’t know is on top, posed by a lake. One kid is lying on his back, propped up on his elbows, making a silly face, his eyes crossed. The other kid is running out of the water. The parents are smiling, but the mom is looking at some other camera. You can tell it’s the kind of picture that only at a later date was designated to be The Card. This is the kind of photo I like. The moment is caught. The people are revealed. They weren’t thinking of an audience. They were just being themselves.

  3

  My parents and Sammy have left for Denver. Usually I feel free when both parents are gone, but instead I’m unsure of every step. I walk down the hall to my brother’s room to rally him into being negative with me.

  “Knock, knock,” I say when I reach his open door.

  He looks up from his guitar, fingers still poised to pluck. Jay is a senior. He puts little effort into getting people to like him, and yet everyone does.

  His girlfriend, Sadie, is on his bed, lying down all casually, but she’s totally trying to be sexy, and it looks false, like a model in a magazine striking an unlikely pose on a park bench. She looks like she’s about to crawl through a low tunnel. Loose curls and dark full eyebrows hold her face in place. Her anime-like eyes are set above high cheekbones. I can’t imagine being so relaxed, so overtly sexual. My freshman year, I went out with a junior—a lacrosse player who ended up cheating on me with someone from his class. A girl like Sadie, whose every move is designed for others to see. I wouldn’t have sex with him. So he found someone who would.

  “Are you packed?” I ask Jay.

  “Yup,” he says.

  He strums on his guitar. His clothes are draped over his desk chair, still on their hangers.

  “I can’t believe you’re leaving,” Sadie says. When she talks, it sounds like she’s gagging on her words.

  “It’ll be fine,” Jay says, as if egging on a friend to jump off a bridge with him.

  “So you’re happy with this situation?” I lean against his door.

  “Of course I’m not happy,” he says.

  “I’m the opposite of happy,” Sadie says.

  “So you guys are the same,” I say, and Sadie seems to be figuring out some complicated math.

  “I don’t see why you can’t live with me,” she says.

  Jay shrugs. I have a feeling he isn’t terribly put out, that he can cope just fine with a little distance from her. As with every girl he’s been with, she’s like Velcro.

  I look out his window to the same view I have of the backyard, guesthouse, pool, and aspen forest. I wonder what our new view will be like. What’s happening to us? Jay looks up from the guitar and sings while making eye contact. I can tell he’s feeling the same way—worried about the future—but we’re both tamping things down, either trying to protect or outlast one another.

  “What if your dad doesn’t, like, win?” Sadie asks. She looks around the room as if afraid to lose something that isn’t even hers. “Could he go to jail? I mean, serial killers are in jail.” Her butt tilts up, punctuating her fear.

  “Really, Sadie?” I say. “They put serial killers in jail? No way!”

  “Hon, it’s not that kind of jail,” Jay says to her. “Remember Martha Stewart? When she went to prison, she taught yoga and made a nativity scene out of ceramics. Plus, my dad doesn’t lose.”

  “And he didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. And Jay’s right. Dad doesn’t lose and he never settles, which makes me think of Cee and her dad. What are they thinking? What happened?

  I text her again:

  I know your dad’s testifying. Why? Talk!

  “Are you almost ready?” I ask.

  “Yup,” he says.

  “I’ll be downstairs.” I head down, looking at my phone, the dots telling me she’s typing, erasing, typing. Finally, a message:

  We R done.

  * * *

  • • •

  I sit on the piano bench and wait, shaking my knee up and down, lightly tapping my fist on the keys. I’m packed and ready to go, and am impatient now to reach a destination I don’t want to get to in the first place. What does she mean, we’re done? It pisses me off—how can she dismiss our friendship with one text? I didn’t do anything. Our dads may not be getting along, but that doesn’t mean you flee. I slam the piano keys. The house is too quiet. Outside, the snow is shaded with a gray light—it’s like we’re orphans in a dystopian land, and any moment I’ll have to run for cover or be assigned to some kind of faction. I bang middle C.

  Jay comes down the stairs holding his clothes, all still on their hangers. His guitar is strapped to his chest, his backpack on his back. If we were in a dystopian thriller, Jay would survive just because others would want him around. Sadie trails behind him, her hand on his shoulder to balance herself on her
high-heeled sneakers. She’d die in the first scene and no one would cry.

  “Ready?” Jay asks.

  “Been ready,” I say. “My stuff’s in the car.”

  “You eager or something?”

  “No, just efficient.” C sharp, C minor.

  By his look, I can tell he’s displeased. Maybe by having me as a sister, his companion for this strange trip. Or maybe he sees that I’m a bit lost, that he’s in charge now, and he isn’t prepared.

  Outside, I wait some more. I wait in the car while he puts our snowboards on the roof. I wait while he loads the trunk. I wait while he says good-bye to Sadie. I’m in the front seat. They’re on the other side toward the back. I stare straight ahead at our house; perched on a rock wall, it glows from the inside. Through all the tall glass windows—the fireplace, the stairs, and the piano. I know we’ll be back soon, but I’m the kind of person who always wants to go home, and now I won’t be able to.

  “Seriously wish your sister wasn’t here right now,” I hear Sadie say. And then in a singsong voice: “I’d go down on you.”

  Oh my god, I’m internally hurling. I don’t hear anything, which means they’re kissing. I’m repulsed, though at the same time, I wish I had someone to miss, someone to kiss, someone who’d be closing their eyes, too. Even a friend to see me off would be nice. I keep thinking that Cee will show, but I give up. She’s not coming.

  Finally, Sadie walks in front of the windshield and throws me a bitchy wave. I give her a thumbs-up, as in, good job skedaddling. Good job being a girl who’d give a farewell bj. Peace.

  But then I feel bad because after she gets in her SUV, she wipes her face below her eyes. My brother gets in, and I wonder if he wants to cry too. I doubt it, but still I make myself stay quiet, because even when I try to say something nice, a little bitterness jumps out like a flea.

  He reverses out of the driveway, then drives ahead slowly. We both look left at our house, the beautiful mass of it, like a castle in the sky. It’s early evening now, and our neighbors’ homes are lit up with Christmas lights. Ours are out.

  “This is so weird,” I say.

  “We’re not going very far,” Jay says.

  4

  We haven’t gone far, yet we have gone oh so far. When we enter the town of Breckenridge, I get nervous, like it’s my first day at school or a new sport. We’ve never skied here, which is strange, considering we have family here, but we always go past it to Vail or Aspen.

  “This is kind of ghetto,” I say. We drive by a set of dark brown condos that look like a motel.

  He pats my shoulder, kind of hard. “There, there,” he says.

  “There, there?”

  “There, there—man up. How’s that?”

  We drive slowly down the main road, which looks about a block long. Jay puts some song on the stereo and it makes this seem even more eventful than it should be. I swear, he makes me feel bad through music.

  “Look,” he says. “Steak and Rib.”

  I look to the left and there it is—my uncle’s restaurant, STEAK AND RIB, which is in need of a paint job. A parrot is painted on the sign, a touch of real snow on the wooden feathers. Seriously. Why a parrot? Just. Why?

  “We can probably eat there all the time,” Jay says.

  “Oh, great,” I say, looking away. “Free steak. And rib.”

  At what looks to be the end of town, he turns off the main road, then into a residential neighborhood. It’s a nice, comfy-looking street with big new homes and pretty Christmas lights, a little reminiscent of our neighborhood in the winter. I sit up a bit.

  “I missed the turn,” Jay says, checking the GPS, and my anticipation is shot. We’re not on the right street, and I bet nothing around here is any better.

  “I can’t believe we’ve never even been to their house,” I say.

  Jay drives back down to Main Street, then into a different neighborhood.

  “This is crazy,” I say. “Our backwoods relations. They probably have skinny dogs. Did Dad fuck up or what.” I drop my words off, all nonchalant.

  “No,” Jay says after a while. “Other people got in over their heads. Now he has to deal with it. It’ll work out.”

  “It better,” I say.

  We drive past Steak and Rib again, then Jay turns into a different area, the homes smaller and older. They all look the same.

  “Look for 431,” he says.

  I look out my window. “On your left, dummy.”

  He slows down in front of a house with curtains that look like doilies, then another with curtains that look like a grannie’s apron. He goes forward, stops again in front of a small green house.

  “This is it,” he says.

  White curtains, basic and drawn, so hopefully they don’t know we’re here yet.

  “Let’s scope things out,” I say, though there isn’t a lot to scope. The house is basically the size of our garage.

  In front of their neighbor’s house is an inflated Santa riding a motorcycle along with lit-up, mechanized lawn angels. The Santa is making a racket, like a blender set on Stir.

  “It seems like the poorer you are, the more Christmas shit you have,” I say.

  “That’s a snobby thing to say,” Jay says.

  “It does sound snobby,” I say. “But I think it’s a pretty accurate observation.”

  He shrugs. He’s happy because he’s unobservant, and I didn’t mean to sound snobby. I kind of like the lawn decorations. We were never able to decorate our tree or string lights because someone is always hired to do that. My friends’ homes always had such odd things—fake mini trees in a Santa boot, ornaments with their faces on them, a collection of nutcrackers, some things beautiful, some things hideous, but all of them fun or holding meaning and memory. Secretly, I have always wanted Christmas shit, even though I roll my eyes alongside my mom when she declares things cheesy.

  “Home, sweet home,” Jay says.

  “Not home, not sweet,” I say.

  “Should we go knock?” He opens his door.

  “You knock, Jay Town.” I laugh, but then realize it sounds kind of cool: J-Town. And I am A-Town. Not bad.

  He gets out, and I follow, feeling like an urchin or a foster child. I take a bag so I have something to hold, something to do with my hands.

  We walk up the path to the front door. I can hear a television and smell something cooking, something fishy yet tough and steaklike. Shrimp, I bet. Barbecue.

  Jay knocks on the door. I clear my throat, and Jay seems to relax his shoulders, and then my uncle Skip opens the door, his face full of happiness and light, his brown eyes moving all over us. I can’t help but smile. He looks like he’s welcoming the hosts of a surprise home-makeover show.

  “Hey, guys!” he says. “Look at you.” He hesitates, not knowing if he should hug us or shake our hands, but then he hugs me, somewhat roughly, patting my back on the way out of the hug. I’ve noticed after puberty, you get hugged differently.

  “Annie!” he says.

  “Hello,” I say, warmed by something in his face—a confusion similar to my own, and yet a casualness and gameness that makes me feel safe. He almost looks like a college student—the kind who doesn’t graduate on time. Skip Town—ha! I only just put this together now, which really proves how little they’re in our lives.

  He hugs Jay heartily, takes him in, hits his back, ruffles his hair.

  “Uncle Skip,” Jay says, and hits his shoulder. Why do guys always have to hit their hellos? “Looking good.”

  “Come on in,” Skip says. “God, it’s been years! You’re human-sized!”

  I feel like I’m meeting future Jay. Another person who only thinks about one thing at a time. We walk in, but I stay close to the door.

  “We’re here,” I say, for some reason.

  “You’re here!” Skip says. “Do
you have more stuff?” He hits himself on his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Of course you do.”

  “Finally!” My aunt Nicole comes from the hall in a way that seems calculated, like she was waiting in the wings for her cue. I haven’t seen her in so long, and yet she kind of looks the same. Like someone still growing.

  “We were wondering when you’d show up.” She walks closer, then greets me with a stiff embrace. She’s a distant hugger, taking my shoulders and sort of shaking them. She’s so different from my mom—she’s sporty and unfiltered, doesn’t put as much thought into her appearance. She and Skip both look so at a loss that it’s almost endearing. It’s like they’ve never dealt with kids before and wish they had a manual.

  Someone sighs.

  “You guys must be tired,” Skip says, as if we’ve come from Uzbekistan.

  “Super tired,” I say, and yawn, and still I’m standing by this damn door.

  Nicole picks up a glass of wine from a table by the couch and takes a big sip.

  “The Price Is Right to Remain Silent,” she says, and Jay and I give each other looks, sharing the awkwardness. We both half laugh, but then she gestures to the TV, which is on Wheel of Fortune. Some lady in a pantsuit solves the puzzle moments after Nicole. Now she’s clapping and bouncing and saying, “Woo!”

  I smile at Nicole, congratulating her, but she appears to give zero fucks about her puzzle-solving skills.

  “We have more stuff outside,” Jay says.

  “I’ll help you out with that,” Skip says. “Or are you guys hungry? I made this Thai beer shrimp—”

  “I knew it!” I say, which makes everyone look at me like I’m a freak instead of a person who likes to cook.

  “Beer shrimp,” Jay says. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, it’s not alcoholic or anything—we wouldn’t serve alcohol. It’s just in the marinade.” Skip pantomimes whisking a sauce.

  “Beautiful,” I mumble, and I mumble because my sincere comments are often taken as sarcasm or, as Jay would say, “snobbiness.” But no. By “beautiful,” I mean beautiful. The lemongrassy tang of Thai. The buttery malt of beer. I would never have thought of that.